Dan Kennedy's blog on media and politics • published by the Boston Phoenix from 2002 to 2005

Friday, April 30, 2004

WE LIVE IN A POLITICAL
WORLD. Two good pieces at Mediachannel.org
on the controversy
over ABC's Nightline, on which Ted Koppel will read the names
of American soldiers killed in Iraq tonight.

Danny Schechter, noting Koppel's
credentials as an establishment conservative, writes,
"It is likely to embolden more critical journalism in the unbrave
patriotically correct world of US media."

Meanwhile, Timothy Karr
reports
that the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which is protesting Koppel's
alleged politicization of the war in Iraq by refusing to run
Nightline on its eight ABC affiliates, makes 98 percent
of its political contributions to Republicans.

Politics is in the eye of the
beholder.

MEDIA LOG ON CNN. I'll be on
CNN's
Reliable Sources
this Sunday (11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.) talking about media coverage of
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. I'm told I'll be on
with Boston Globe reporter Michael
Kranish, lead author of the
Globe Kerry bio, and National Review Online's Jonah
Goldberg.

Thursday, April 29, 2004

AN INTRIGUING TERROR
CONNECTION. Is there an actual, provable link between Saddam
Hussein's former regime and international terrorism? That's always
been the big question. If the White House had been able to prove such
a connection, a whole lot more people would have supported the war in
Iraq.

This editorial
in today's Wall Street Journal tells what is known so far
(which is admittedly not much) about a terrorist attack that was
foiled in Jordan earlier this month. Among the allegations: the
terrorists had planned to use poison gas, which could have killed as
many as 80,000 people; the gas came from Syria; it might have been
shipped to Syria from Iraq before the war; and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,
whom the Bush administration says was given carte blanche to operate
in Iraq by Saddam's government, may have been behind the
plot.

Here is a piece
from the Christian Science Monitor of Tuesday covering much of
the same ground.

Obviously we need to wait for a
much more in-depth report. It's always curious when the
Journal's right-wing editorial page runs with something that
its news section - one of the finest in the world - has ignored. But
this is potentially a huge story.

HATE SPEECH AT UMASS. There
is opposing the war but supporting the troops. There is opposing the
war while openly mocking the troops. And there is a UMass student by
the name of Rene Gonzalez, who actually manages to trash the memory
of Pat
Tillman, the NFL star who
joined the Army Rangers after 9/11, and who was killed in action in
Afghanistan.

Gonzalez, after calling Tillman an
"idiot," writes
in the Daily Collegian:

Tillman, probably acting
out his nationalist-patriotic fantasies forged in years of
exposure to Clint Eastwood and Rambo movies, decided to insert
himself into a conflict he didn't need to insert himself into. It
wasn't like he was defending the East coast from an invasion of a
foreign power. THAT would have been heroic and laudable. What he
did was make himself useful to a foreign invading army, and he
paid for it. It's hard to say I have any sympathy for his death
because I don't feel like his "service" was necessary. He wasn't
defending me, nor was he defending the Afghani people. He was
acting out his macho, patriotic crap and I guess someone with a
bigger gun did him in.

Wow. I guess what surprised me the
most is that Gonzalez is described as a graduate student. Most
people get such crap out of their systems by the time they're 21 or
22.

Well, Gonzalez's views are
protected by the First Amendment, if not by the rule of common sense
or decency.

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY'S VERY BAD
DAY. The historian and John Kerry biographer gets one
upside
the head from Boston
Globe columnist Alex Beam. I'd say Beam has Brinkley dead to
rights in his portrayal of him as a campaign surrogate.

Here is Brinkley's Tuesday
piece
for Salon (sub. req.) on the non-story of whether Kerry threw
his ribbons or his medals over the fence in 1971. Pretty convincing.
But - idiotic as this controversy may be - why can't Kerry explain it
as succinctly and convincingly as Brinkley, Tom
Oliphant, and
Robert
Sam Anson?

Wednesday, April 28, 2004

LET THEM EAT BOEUF!
Media Log's slogan: You can't make this stuff up!® I just
found this nugget near the end of John Harris's Washington
Poststory
of last Saturday on Republican efforts to cast Senator John Kerry as
a wealthy elitist:

There has been an echo of
this kind of down-home invective in the controversy over Kerry's
statement that foreign leaders secretly back his candidacy.
Pressed last Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" on where and when
the leaders told him this, Kerry declined to say, but he noted:
"You can go to New York City and you can be in a restaurant and
you can meet a foreign leader."

This prompted House Majority
Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) on Monday to sneer: "I don't know where
John Kerry eats, or what restaurants he attends in New York City.
But I tell you, at the Taste of Texas restaurant - it's this great
steakhouse in Houston, Texas - the only foreign leader you meet
there is called filet mignon."

Boneless steak for a bonehead. Don't
you wish Tom DeLay was your congressman?

COMMON USAGE. Not long after
writing a piece on the rivalry
between the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald, I
received a message from inside Wingo Square. My informant complained
I hadn't noted that the title of the redesigned Boston Globe
Magazine's front-of-the-book
section - "Boston Uncommon"
- was already being used by Herald sports columnist
Howard
Bryant.

Fair enough. But it turns out that
"Boston Uncommon" is about as original as "it was a dark and stormy
night." Click here
and you'll see what I mean. "Boston Uncommon" has been
used to describe wedding and honeymoon packages, attractions for
students, and crab cakes. It's the name of a vocal group, the title
of an article about Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and the headline on a
story about a Palm Beach County gardener who moved there from
Boston.

The Christian Science
Monitor used it for a things-to-do piece. TCPalm.com, a Florida
website, used it for an 82-year-old guy who was planning to run the
Boston Marathon. The Cincinnati Post used it to describe a
former Ohio State football star named David Boston.

Titles are often used to evoke a
sense of the familiar rather than dazzle with originality. They also
can't be copyrighted, although they can be trademarked for certain
limited purposes. (Very limited, as Roger
Ailes learned when he went
after Al Franken.)

AIR AMERICA'S GROWING PAINS.
Ridiculous though it may be, it appears that the death watch has
already begun for Air
America Radio. The
Chicago Tribunereported
yesterday that two of the liberal network's top executives, Mark
Walsh and Dave Logan, have left the building - Walsh under his own
power, Logan possibly not. This comes on the heels of a legal and
financial dispute that has left Air America without stable homes in
Los Angeles and Chicago.

The New York Timesfollows
up today. And Michael
Harrison, publisher of Talkers magazine, tells
the Washington Post the obvious: "Chaos is not a good sign." A
nitwit named Corey Deitz goes so far as to argue
that Air America hosts Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo should emulate
Gordon Liddy. What, by going to prison?

Needless to say, Air America can't
be heard in Boston, either, unless you're paying for satellite radio
or listening to the live stream over the Web.

Obviously Air America is going
through growing pains, or maybe something rather worse than that. But
the network is still only a month old. The unanswered question - and
the key to the whole operation - is how much money its backers are
prepared to spend to get this thing off the ground. If they're
willing to spend whatever it takes for a year or two, then the
current chaos doesn't matter. If they were hoping to break even
within months after launching, then one suspects they didn't know
what they were getting into in the first place.

Air America continues to add
affiliates, including WMTW Radio (AM 870) in Portland, Maine. The
station is changing its call letters to WLVP, which veteran
radio-watcher Scott Fybush guesses
stands for "Liberal Voice of Portland."

One thing I wonder about is whether
the liberal audience that Air America has targeted really understands
how bad talk radio is most of the time. Everyone talks about how
successful Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are, but they host
dreadful, almost unlistenable shows - smug, boring, unentertaining
agitprop that is nearly impossible to listen to unless you've been
lobotomized. Air America wants to rise above that, but it's
hard to do so hour after hour after hour. Conservatives may be
willing to listen to such crap, but that's one of the reasons that
they're conservatives.

Time will tell whether Air America
is going to succeed, and money will determine how much time there is.
Everything else is irrelevant.

THE SILENCE OF THE LEAKEE.
There is a magical moment laying bare the media-political axis
toward the end of today's James Risen New York Timesstory
on Defense Department neocon conspiracy theorist Douglas Feith ("the
fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth," according to
General
Tommy Franks).

Risen writes this about Michael
Maloof, one of several deep thinkers Feith brought in to concoct ties
between Iraq and Al Qaeda:

Mr. Maloof's Pentagon
career was damaged in December 2001, when his security clearances
were revoked. He was accused of having unauthorized contact with a
foreign national, a woman he had met while traveling in the
Republic of Georgia and eventually married. Mr. Maloof said he
complied with all requirements to disclose the relationship.
Several intelligence professionals say he came under scrutiny
because of suspicions that he had leaked classified information in
the past to the news media, a charge that Mr. Maloof denies.
His lawyer, Sam Abady says that Mr. Maloof was a target because of
his controversial intelligence work and political ties to
conservative Pentagon leaders.

Today's question: is there any
chance whatsoever that Risen doesn't know whether or not Maloof
had leaked classified information to the news media?

Tuesday, April 27, 2004

NOT-SO-TABLOID VALUES. The
Boston Herald today opted for substance over sensation in a
heartening way. Like the Boston Globe, the tabloid led with
Superior Court judge Margot Botsford's ruling that the state's system
for financing public education is inadequate and discriminates
against poorer communities.

The front-page splash in the
Herald is "SAVE OUR SCHOOLS," along with a photo of Julie
Hancock, the Brockton 10th-grader who is the lead plaintiff in the
lawsuit. (Hancock is the daughter of Brockton School Committee member
Maurice Hancock.) Inside is a meaty, two-page package - a
lead
story by Kevin Rothstein,
sidebars by Rothstein on Hancock
and school-funding activist Norma
Shapiro, a column
(sub. req.) by Mike Barnicle (who failed to stay on message, instead
going off on a bender about gay marriage), and a chart showing
educational inequities between rich and poor communities.

The Globe's coverage,
by Anand Vaishnav, is fine, and I'll certainly take the
Globe's supportive
editorial over the
Herald's miserly
stance. But the
Herald's package was, I hope, a sign that acting editor Ken
Chandler's reign isn't going to be all sex and celebrity.

SMEARING KERRY'S SERVICE.
There has always been something uniquely John Kerry-ish about the matter
of whether it was his medals or his ribbons that he threw over the
fence at that antiwar rally in Washington more than three decades
ago, or even whether medals and ribbons are or are not the same
thing. As Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi
writes
today, "A person watching Kerry run for president wants to shake him
and say, 'Stop, please stop.'"

Still, ABC News's "exclusive"
on Good Morning America yesterday is an utter disgrace - an
attempt to make something out of nothing, and to impugn the integrity
and patriotism of someone who came to oppose an immoral war in which
he had fought. Tom Oliphant's eyewitness
account in today's
Globe ought to put this non-story to rest.

"God, they're doing the bidding of
the Republican National Committee," the Globe's Patrick Healy
quotes
Kerry as saying of ABC. Kerry's right, and it's frighteningly
reminiscent of the way that the media took dictation from the
Republicans in going after Al Gore four years ago.

Yet Healy also undermines Kerry's
ability to defend himself by getting something else half-right. In
response to the ABC/GOP smear, Healy writes, "Kerry turned the issue
against the president, saying for the first time that Bush was far
more vulnerable on matters of Vietnam-era choices because of
questions about whether he completed his service in the Texas Air
National Guard. 'He owes America an explanation about whether or not
he showed up for duty in the National Guard. Prove it,' Kerry told
NBC." Healy then adds:

Kerry has said for months
that he would not question the president's Texas Air National
Guard record even as his allies, such as the Democratic National
Committee chairman, Terry McAuliffe, and former US senator Max
Cleland, suggested Bush had been "AWOL" at times in the early '70s
and may not have completed his Guard service. Kerry said that, as
a Vietnam veteran, he had come to terms with others' decisions
about serving their country during the Vietnam era, and once
defended President Clinton for not serving.

And then this, farther down in the
article:

Republicans, meanwhile,
pounced on Kerry's comments about Bush yesterday, noting his past
pledge not to criticize the military service of other members of
the Vietnam generation. "It's another example of John Kerry saying
one thing and doing another: He said he would never question the
president's honorable service in the National Guard, but now he is
lashing out," said Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for the Bush
campaign. "It is a purely venomous political attack, and the
American people will reject it."

Now, I can't cite chapter and
verse. But I've followed this pretty closely, and it seems to me that
Kerry has always said the issue he considered out of bounds was
Bush's decision to serve in the Texas Air National Guard rather than
opt for potentially more hazardous duty in the US military. To my
knowledge, though, Kerry has never said he would not question
whether Bush didn't serve in the National Guard. (Oof. Triple
negative. Sorry.) Those are two completely different issues. Choosing to serve in the Guard is one thing; blowing it off is quite another. And if
the Republicans are going to attack Kerry's military service, it is
absurd to think that Kerry shouldn't fight back.

E.J. Dionne has a terrific
column
in today's Washington Post on the Republicans' loathsome
attempts to smear Kerry's military record, noting that Bush's fellow
Republican John McCain has come to Kerry's defense. Asks Dionne: "Now
that McCain has spoken, will Bush have the guts to endorse or condemn
the attacks on Kerry's service? Or will he just sit by silently,
hoping the assaults do their work while he evades
responsibility?"

Sadly, I think we already know the
answer.

SEVERIN'S WORDS. The
Boston Globe has obtained a transcript
of WTKK Radio (96.9 FM) talk-show host Jay Severin's remarks of last
Thursday, which he both defended and expressed "regret" for
yesterday
afternoon.

There appears to be something for
everyone. On the one hand, Severin was right about what he actually
said. He did not say, "I've got an idea, let's kill all
Muslims," as claimed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations
(CAIR), which has called for his firing. As Severin correctly said
yesterday, his actual words to a caller were, "You think we should
befriend them; I think we should kill them."

On the other hand, Severin offered
virtually no context, at least according to the Globe report,
by Michael Rosenwald. At one point, Severin is quoted as having said,
"My suspicion is that the majority of Muslims in the United States,
who regard themselves as Muslims first and not as Americans really at
all, see an American map one day where this is the United States of
Islam, not the United States of America. I think it pays to harbor
those suspicions."

That doesn't sound like someone who
was only advocating the killing of Islamist terrorists.

Monday, April 26, 2004

SEVERIN DENIES CHARGES. I
just listened to Jay Severin's opening monologue on WTKK Radio (96.9
FM). Severin addressed the claim
made by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) that he had
said on his show last Thursday, "I've got an idea, let's kill all
Muslims." Severin denied ever having said such a thing, blasted the
Boston Globe for reporting CAIR's charges without contacting
him first, but nevertheless expressed "regret" to anyone who was
offended by his remarks.

Calling it "a big story about
imagined hate speech," Severin said, "If we were to make a tape of
it, I could find maybe 1000 recordings ... with my saying the
following words: all Muslims are not terrorists, all Muslims are not
our enemies. But, so far, all the terrorists killing us are Muslims."
He referred to Boston Globe columnist Jeff
Jacoby's Sunday piece on
Arab and Muslim hatred toward the United States, and to a
front-page
story in today's New
York Times headlined "Militants in Europe Openly Call for Jihad
and the Rule of Islam."

Severin said that his remark about
killing Muslims came in response to a caller who advocated peaceful
relations with those elements of the Islamic world that hate the US. "When he said to me, 'I think we
should be befriend them,' I said, 'I have a different notion, a
different policy. I think we should kill them,'" Severin said today.
He added: "I certainly regret any misunderstanding. I certainly
regret any discomfort that may have been caused by the
misunderstanding of my remarks." But he said that he has been "very
clear, very contextual, very consistent" in saying that the US should
kill its Muslim enemies - not that it should kill all
Muslims.

"My remarks were not taken out of
context. Someone made up my remarks," Severin said. He charged that
CAIR simply took what a listener had e-mailed to the organization and
wrote up a press release demanding that Severin be fired. "Those
words were never uttered by me. Not off the air, not on the air, not
ever. Never uttered by me," he said, calling CAIR's characterization
"100 percent false. A fantasy, a fabrication, totally made
up."

Severin also accused the
Globe of not checking with him before going to press. (The
Globe's story was published on Sunday, not Saturday, as I
mistakenly reported earlier today.) He said someone at the
Globe told him today that the reporter, Jessica Bennett, had
tried to reach him and failed. But Severin said, "I'm in a 24/7
business. Everyone knows how to contact me."

He added: "My statements weren't
taken out of context. My statements were made up, and then printed by
the Boston Globe. Now, I wish to repeat that I'm not here to offend
anyone. [Media Log aside: Hah!] I'm here to provoke
thought, I'm here to express opinion."

A few off-the-cuff
observations:

- A couple of quibbles aside, I
basically believe Severin. I am thoroughly disgusted by his referring
to Arabs and Muslims as "towelheads," by his suggestions that the US
should nuke its enemies, and by his advocacy of scorched-earth
tactics in Iraq. But I listen to him enough to know that it's not
credible to imagine he would suddenly call for the deaths of "all"
Muslims. He's always been clear that he wants us to kill Islamist
terrorists who are trying to kill us. And, of course, we
should.

- Severin refers to the
Globe as "a ridiculously irresponsible major newspaper" for
going to print without first contacting him. But according to
Bennett's story, she did contact the station's general
manager, Matt Mills, who reportedly declined to comment. She also
refers to Severin's remarks as "alleged," which does qualify things a
bit. CAIR had put out a press
release on the wires the
day before the Globe story ran. Assuming that Bennett
genuinely attempted to reach Severin and couldn't, her and the
paper's choice was either to run with what they had or hold it. Maybe
they could have waited another day, but I don't think the decision
they made was wrong.

- Severin makes no reference to an
e-mail that Mills supposedly sent to CAIR in which he said: "I have
spoken to Jay Severin and he knows we take this seriously and do not
condone offensive remarks toward any religious groups and he will be
apologizing on his show Monday afternoon. He did not intend to offend
anyone." Maybe Mills will now claim that he never sent any such
e-mail. But assuming that he did, it sounds like Mills was upset with
his star talk-show host. Severin should have talked about that rather
than blaming everything on CAIR and the Globe.

Maybe he will later this afternoon.
Unfortunately, I won't be listening, because I'm on deadline with
other matters.

SEVERIN REPORTEDLY TO
APOLOGIZE. Well, this should be interesting. The Council
on American-Islamic Relations
(CAIR) claims it has been promised that WTKK Radio (96.9 FM)
talk-show host Jay
Severin will apologize
today during his show for saying, "I've got an idea, let's kill all
Muslims." Severin allegedly made that remark last
Thursday.

CAIR quotes
from an e-mail the organization says it received from the station's
general manager, Mark Mills: "I have spoken to Jay Severin and he
knows we take this seriously and do not condone offensive remarks
toward any religious groups and he will be apologizing on his show
Monday afternoon. He did not intend to offend anyone."

Severin's alleged outburst
reportedly came he while talking about a supposed Muslim plan to take
over America, even if it takes centuries. CAIR is calling for Severin
to be fired. The organization's chairman, Omar Ahmad, is quoted as
saying: "We believe a mere reprimand and apology is insufficient and
demand that he be taken off the air as he would be if he had attacked
any other religious or ethnic group."

I didn't hear Severin, so I don't
want to prejudge this. I'll wait to hear what he has to say shortly
after 3. But if past is prologue, this is unsurprising. As I've
observed
previously, Severin regularly refers to Arabs and Muslims as
"towelheads" and illegal immigrants as "wetbacks." He has often
advocated the use of nuclear weapons against enemies of the United
States. And with the death toll in Iraq rising, Severin has expressed
frustration that the US military is engaging in urban warfare - thus
costing American lives - instead of essentially leveling areas where
the Iraqi opposition is strong.

But doesn't Severin have a First
Amendment right to say such things? Yes, of course. What he
doesn't have is a First Amendment right to host a talk show.
Hate speech is protected, but it's up to the management of WTKK to
decide whether it wants to pay for such garbage. And CAIR has a First
Amendment right to protest and to demand that Severin be
fired.

Recently another 'TKK talk-show
host, Mike Barnicle, apologized
for using the word "Mandingo" in referring to the marriage of former
secretary of defense William Cohen, who's white, and former Boston
television personality Janet Langhart, who's black.

Last October, WEEI Radio (AM 850),
after initially trying to ride it out, suspended
John Dennis and Gerry Callahan for two weeks after they jokingly
referred to a gorilla that had escaped from the Franklin Park Zoo as
a "Metco gorilla." Metco is a program that lets urban
African-American kids attend public schools in the
suburbs.

Two months before that, one of
'EEI's sister stations, WRKO Radio (AM 680), parted
company with John "Ozone"
Osterlind after Osterlind allegedly called for the "eradication" of
the Palestinian people on the air. (At the time of his departure,
Osterlind disputed what happened, and a complete tape of his
offending remarks has never surfaced. And a disclosure: WRKO pays me
to talk about the media on The Pat Whitley Show every Friday
at 9 a.m.)

All this is only tangentially tied
to the uproar over indecency. That, after all, only dates back to the
Super Bowl. Rather, what all of these local incidents have in common
is that they involve ugly joking, or even hate speech, about race,
ethnicity, and/or religion. Such a thing would have been unheard of -
literally - 10 years ago, but it has become a staple as
corporate-owned radio chains have continued their downward
spiral.

I suspect that Severin will slide
by with an apology, and that he'll be able to claim his remarks were made within an entirely political context. In any event, stay tuned.

Friday, April 23, 2004

BITCH, BITCH, BITCH. If you
turn to page E13 of today's Boston Globe, you'll find this
where Doonesbury usually appears:

To our
readers

The Globe has decided not to
publish today's installment of "Doonesbury" because the strip
includes language inappropriate for a general readership. The
strip's creator declined to change the wording or offer a
substitute. "Doonesbury" resumes in tomorrow's comics pages.
Today's strip is available online at www.boston.com/ae/comics/.

Now, I already knew that B.D.'s leg
had been blown off in Iraq. When I saw the disclaimer this morning, I
figured cartoonist Garry Trudeau must have had him let loose an
F-bomb. So I was more than a little surprised when I learned the
offending phrase was "son of a bitch." Pretty mild stuff.

Romenesko's got a round-up
of newspaper reaction. To me, the proof that the Globe
overreacted was the decision by the Tallahassee Democrat to
run the strip unedited.

A couple of additional
observations:

- Adam Gaffin, the Roslindale guy
behind Boston
Online, did a
quick
search and found that the
Globe published 12 articles last year that used the word
"bitch." His suggestion: if "bitch" is too rough for the funny pages,
move Doonesbury to the op-ed page. (He also suggests moving
Mallard Fillmore and maybe Boondocks to op-ed, but, uh,
don't you need room for columns and stuff?)

- The Globe's wimp-out
suggests that the Internet has made it too easy for editors to err on
the side of hypercaution. Doonesbury has always been
controversial, and a number of newspapers have pulled it from time to
time over the years. (And, kids, you're not going to believe this:
Doonesbury used to be funny, too. It was during a time called
the '70s.) Ten years ago, an editor would have to think long and hard
before dumping that day's Doonesbury, since it would have been
very difficult for readers to see it elsewhere. Today, not only can
Globe readers find it on the Web, but the Globe gives
them the URL.

The good part is that even if
something like today's Doonesbury gets dumped, it's still
widely available to almost everyone. The bad part is that this
encourages fuzzy thinking: the consequences are much lower for an
editor who decides not to run a cartoon if he or she knows that
readers will be no more than mildly inconvenienced.

ANOTHER MAGIC WOODWARD
MOMENT. The reason that the Bush-Cheney website recommends
Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack is that George W. Bush is
running for re-election and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
isn't.

In September 2002, according to
Woodward, Bush met with congressional leaders and outlined the
reasons he was considering going to war. By Woodward's account, it
went well. Then it was Rumsfeld's turn. Woodward writes:

In the "Night Note for
September 4," Christine M. Ciccone, a young lawyer who covered the
Senate for [Nicholas] Calio [Bush's congressional
liaison], reported on Rumsfeld's one-and-a-half-hour briefing.
"You have already heard it was a disaster and [Trent] Lott
views it as having destroyed all of the goodwill and groundwork
that the president accomplished during his meeting this morning. I
found myself struggling to keep from laughing out loud at times,
especially when Sec. Rumsfeld became a caricature of himself with
the 'we know what we know, we know there are things we do not
know, and we know there are things we know we don't know we don't
know.'"

Senators had expected that the
briefing, coming on the heels of the president's meeting that
morning, would begin the process of making the administration's
case, she reported. "Instead, Secretary Rumsfeld was not prepared
to discuss Iraq issues, was unwilling to share even the most basic
intelligence information, and wasn't having a good day.... There
is a lot of cleanup work to do here."

Thursday, April 22, 2004

WHAT THE POST DIDN'T TELL
YOU. Here's an intriguing tidbit from Bob Woodward's new book,
Plan of Attack. In December 2001, the CIA - following up on
information from Britain's MI6 - learned of Pakistan's role in
nuclear proliferation. CIA director George Tenet reportedly had a
meeting with Pakistan's president, General Pervez Musharraf, in which
he "peel[ed] back the eyeballs" of his host.

Among other things, the CIA feared
that nuclear technology had fallen into the hands of Al
Qaeda.

The Washington Post learned
of this as well. Woodward explains why you didn't read about
it:

Two reporters at The
Washington Post had got wind of the possible nuclear or dirty
bomb threat and a story was about to be published on Sunday,
December 2, with some of the details. With Tenet out of the
country, a very senior CIA official called me at home hours before
the story was to be printed and urged it be delayed.

Of Musharraf, the official said,
"We leaned on him heavily" and were "turning the screws." The
official said, "We just reached the point where they [the
Pakistanis] will work with us. A story would cause them to
clam up and they would see it as an attempt to pressure them"
through the media. The information was sketchy, he said. "What we
have is more suggestive than conclusive."

Len Downie, the executive editor
of the Post, spoke with the CIA official and decided to
hold the story.

Two days later, Woodward writes,
the Post ran a watered-down version.

This is reminiscent of the New
York Times' decision in 1961, at another time of high national
anxiety, to tone down its story about the pending Bay of Pigs
invasion of Cuba after the White House intervened with legendary
Washington columnist and editor James Reston. The Times and
the Bay of Pigs is as much myth as fact - the truth is that the
Times didn't really change its story all that much - but the
the circumstances are similar.

I think the Post made the
right call on the loose-nuke story, especially coming less than three
months after 9/11. Still, it's interesting to find out what goes on
behind closed doors at our leading news organizations.

DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT
TECHNOLOGY. The New York Times is at it again. Just three
days after publishing a story about the online-music industry that
was largely based on a
false premise, today the
paper runs an editorial blasting the indecency crusade (good), with
reasoning based on yet another false premise (bad, bad!).

Noting that Congress is now
considering whether to extend indecency standards to pay-TV services
such as HBO, home of The Sopranos, the Timeswrites:
"Washington's pro-decency crusade is no excuse to regulate media
that do not use public airwaves. Tony Soprano's foul speech is
constitutionally protected."

My goodness gracious, no, as Donald
Rumsfeld would say, and as Tony Soprano might soon be saying as well.
As I explained
recently, it might very well be possible to extend indecency
standards to cable - including pay TV - because, in fact, those
services do use the public airwaves. Remember, cable used to
be called "community antenna television," and though the name has
changed, the technology hasn't. Your local cable operator has a huge
"head end" antenna somewhere in the vicinity that pulls programming
off a satellite before sending it to your home. The signal travels
from satellite to head-end antenna via - are you paying attention,
Gail Collins? - the public airwaves!

Because of this, there are those
who believe the FCC doesn't even need additional congressional
approval to start regulating cable.

The best legal argument for leaving
pay TV alone is that, unlike over-the-air broadcast channels that
come into your home whether you want them or not, you've got to make
two voluntary choices to get, say, HBO: first, you've got to sign up
for cable or satellite TV; then you've got to make the additional
decision to pay for HBO.

The Times' heart is in the
right place, but it's not going to convince anyone if it can't make a
technologically factual argument.

NEW IN THIS WEEK'S
PHOENIX. What's wrong
with campaign-finance reform. Also, the ghost of Thomas
Jefferson has words with
the Defense Department and the Secret Service.

Wednesday, April 21, 2004

MAYBE IF ASHCROFT DEMANDS THE
CAPE COD TIMES' SUBSCRIPTION LIST ... The indefatigable
Walter Brooks has posted on his Cape
Cod Media site
two
editorials on the loathsome
Patriot Act. One, from the New York Times, is against it. The
other, from the Cape Cod Times, is all for it.

Amazingly, the Cape Cod paper, part
of the Dow Jones empire, goes so far as to support the most chilling
part of the Patriot Act - Section 215, which allows federal agents,
with minimal court oversight, to demand that a library or bookstore
turn over the records of a patron in total secrecy, with no right of
appeal. The editorial says:

That's why the Patriot Act
allows - with FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act]
court approval - the FBI to snoop and gather third-party records
without the criminal requirement of certifying that a crime has
already taken place, or informing the subject of a search with a
traditional warrant. If a terror attack is looming, what would be
the point of telling would-be Mohammed Attas they're under
suspicion?

By contrast, the New York
Times says this:

Among the most troubling
provisions is Section 215, which allows the F.B.I. to order
libraries, hospitals and others with personal records to hand over
such information about individuals. People like librarians can be
jailed if they refuse, or if they notify the targets. Another
authorizes "sneak and peek" searches, in which the government can
secretly search people's homes and delay telling them about the
intrusions. As troubling as specific provisions like these is the
"mission creep" that has inevitably occurred. Mr. Bush's own
Justice Department told Congress last fall that the act's loosened
restrictions on government surveillance were regularly being used
in nonterrorism cases, like drug trafficking and white-collar
crime.

Brooks presents the two editorials
with this puckish introduction: "Both the Cape Cod Times and
the New York Times ran lead editorials today on the wisdom of
passing The Patriot Act which expires shortly. The two editorials are
diametrically opposed, and we recommend that our readers be the judge
of which advice to follow."

REAL MEN DON'T NEED TRIALS.
Also not big on legal protections today is the Boston Herald,
whose front-page - festooned with a huge file photo of Saddam Hussein
shortly after being pulled out of the spider hole - declares: $75
MILLION TO PROVE WHAT WE KNOW ALREADY: HE'S GUILTY!

Inside, David Guarino's
story
makes the perfectly reasonable point that $75 million is an awful lot
of money for the tribunal that Iraq plans to establish.

Tuesday, April 20, 2004

KERRY'S RE-ELECTION
CAMPAIGN.Boston Globe Washington-bureau chief Peter
Canellos has come up with a new way of framing the Bush-Kerry race.
In his Tuesday "National Perspective" column, Canellos
writes
that Kerry is running as the incumbent and Bush as the challenger.
The idea is that with Bush under fire for his handling of such
life-and-death matters as Iraq and 9/11, it is Kerry who represents
continuity and Bush who personifies radical change - change for the
worse:

Kerry, for his part, seems
to have realized that his best hope is to run as the Default
President, the place to which voters can connect when the regular
president goes on the fritz.

This makes Kerry's position
unusual, to say the least, for a presidential challenger. Instead
of painting castles in the sky and urging voters to share his
dreams, Kerry has been grounding himself in the policies of the
past. He will try to become the incumbent in the race,
representing 50 years of postwar consensus against four years of
Bush.

Canellos is definitely on to
something, but is Kerry being smart? For the moment, yes, because
Bush is melting down. But surely the Kerry campaign can't expect that
to last through Election Day. Once Bush regains his groove, Kerry's
current above-the-fray stance is going to start looking an awful lot
like the diffidence that got him into so much trouble last year, when
his campaign nearly died before it could reach the starting
line.

Slate's Kerry-loathing
blogger, Mickey Kaus, argues
(scroll down to April 12) that the senator's best shot is to stay out
of sight: "John Kerry does best when he's exposed to the voters
least! His optimal approach is to let Bush stew in the Iraq mess
while he remains offstage, an attractive unknown. Any other strategy
is a triumph of vanity over recent experience."

But that's not right. In fact, it's
when Kerry gets over-confident and slides into autopilot that he gets
into trouble. In nearly every one of his political campaigns, he's
looked surprisingly vulnerable until crunch time, when he goes into
crisis mode and blows his opponent away, whether it be Bill Weld in
Massachusetts eight years ago or Howard Dean in Iowa three months
ago. Somehow I doubt that's going to work against Karl
Rove.

It's crisis time right now, and
it's going to stay that way until November.

SPEED READING. Unless you're
actually planning to read all 432 pages of John F. Kerry: The
Complete Biography by the Boston Globe Reporters Who Know Him
Best (and you know you're not; I might, but then I get paid to do
such things), you will want to check out Chris Suellentrop's amusing
guide
to the highlights.

Monday, April 19, 2004

WHEN DID BUSH TELL RICE HE WAS
GOING TO WAR? How soon we forget! The national-security adviser
went on CBS's Face the Nation yesterday and responded to the
charge in Bob Woodward's new book, Plan of Attack, that George
W. Bush decided to go to war in January 2003, while UN weapons
inspections were still under way. The Los Angeles Timesreports:

National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that President Bush's decision to
invade Iraq was not made in January 2003, as a new book asserts,
but came in March, after all efforts to avoid a war had been
exhausted.

The statement in "Plan of
Attack," by Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob
Woodward, is "simply not, not right," Rice said on CBS's "Face the
Nation."

In an interview broadcast
yesterday evening on CBS's "60 Minutes," Woodward said that "the
decision [to invade] was conveyed to Condi Rice in early
January.... [Bush] was frustrated with the weapons
inspections. He had promised the United Nations and the world and
the country that either the U.N. would disarm Saddam
[Hussein] or he, George Bush, would do it, and do it alone
if necessary."

But Rice said the final
determination that war would occur came more than two months after
their private conversation at Bush's Texas ranch.

In that conversation, Rice told
CBS, she and Bush were discussing Bush's frustrations with Saddam,
who Bush said "was starting to fool the world again, as he had
over the past 12 years."

"He said, 'Now, I think we
probably are going to have to go to war, we're going to have to go
to war,'" Rice said.

But that "was not a decision to
go to war," she continued. "The decision to go to war is in March.
The president is saying in that [January] conversation, 'I
think the chances are that this is not going to work out any other
way. We're going to have to go to war.'"

You can read the full Face the
Nation transcript here
(PDF format). But let's get real, shall we? If anything, Woodward is
being incredibly generous to the White House in asserting that the
decision was not made until January 2003. Here's the lead of a piece
that appeared in Time magazine on March 31, 2003:

"F--- Saddam. we're taking
him out." Those were the words of President George W. Bush, who
had poked his head into the office of National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice. It was March 2002, and Rice was meeting with
three U.S. Senators, discussing how to deal with Iraq through
the United Nations, or perhaps in a coalition with America's
Middle East allies. Bush wasn't interested. He waved his hand
dismissively, recalls a participant, and neatly summed up his Iraq
policy in that short phrase. The Senators laughed uncomfortably;
Rice flashed a knowing smile. The President left the room.

As far as I know, Time's
account has never been challenged. As we know from a spate of new
books - by former counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke,
journalist Ron Suskind (who collaborated with former Treasury
secretary Paul O'Neill), and others - the White House, and especially
Vice-President Dick Cheney, started talking about going to war with
Iraq in 2001, especially after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Bush's
chief of staff, Andrew Card, spoke
infamously about not
wanting to roll out a "new product" (war, that is) until September 2002.

And good grief: Time's Karen
Tumulty was on the set with Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer
yesterday, but she never said a thing about her own magazine's
year-old exclusive. What is wrong with these people?

DIGITALLY CLUELESS AT THE
TIMES.In today's New York Times, Ken Belson
writes
about Sony's attempts to catch up with Apple in the online music
business. The ninth paragraph is a howler:

Like Apple's iTunes online
music store, [Sony's] Connect will have 500,000 songs that
can be downloaded for 99 cents each. But while iTunes songs can
be played only on iPods, Sony already sells a variety of
devices, including minidisc and compact disc players, which can
play songs bought on Connect's Web site. Sony's new Hi-MD disc
player, for instance, will hold up to 45 hours of music on one
disc, which will retail for about $7.

Well, uh, no. Not even close. At
the most basic level, you can burn a CD with songs that you download
from the iTunes Music Store, allowing you to listen to your music on
any CD player on the planet. In fact, that's the way most people use
the store - popular though the iPod may be, there are far more iTunes
Music Store customers out there than there are iPod owners. Belson
should have looked at this.

But though that's Belson's most
obvious mistake, it goes deeper. Apple sells songs in a format known
as AAC, which appears to be the crux of Belson's confusion. AAC is a competitor to MP3 that provides slightly smaller file
sizes, slightly better sound quality, and "digital rights management"
protection - that is, you can burn "playlists" onto a few CDs, but
you can't burn, say, 100, at least not without changing the order of
the tracks. There are a few other limitations, too. The idea is to
let you share your music with family members and friends, but not to
enable full-scale piracy.

However, the tracks on the CD
you've just burned are no longer AACs - they've been expanded into
standard AIFF files, as are all sound tracks on CDs. (This obviously
doesn't mean that the richness that was stripped out when the music
was compressed has somehow been magically restored; that's gone for
good.) You can now take your CD and rip it into plain, unprotected
MP3s. (Apple's claims that these MP3s will somehow be unlistenable
are - how to put this? - not true. This is the equivalent of your
first-grade teacher telling you that you will die if you put your
pencil in your mouth.)

Now you can do anything you like
with your MP3-ized iTunes songs - copy them onto a non-Apple MP3
player, burn them onto a CD-MP3 disc (like the 45-hour disc to which
Belson refers), whatever. Some of those devices might even carry the
Sony brand.

This is not a minor error that
Belson made. The entire point of his story is that consumers
of digital music are awash in a sea of proprietary standards -
Apple's got one, Microsoft's got another, and now Sony is about to
introduce yet another. Gosh darn, what is the poor consumer to
do?

Well, one place to start is to go
somewhere other than the New York Times for authoritative
information.

Friday, April 16, 2004

SNOOP DOGGED. The problem
with Alexander Cockburn's CounterPunch
is that you have to wade through dreck like this: "In Nazi Germany
and the old Soviet Union, both run by a better class of people than
we now have in public service in the U.S. of A. today ..."

Still, the essay
from which that bit of hate speech is taken, by a lawyer named J.
Michael Springmann, is worth reading. Springmann was subjected to
e-mail surveillance under the Patriot Act because he represented a
woman who was a suspected Al Qaeda agent. Springmann
writes:

Beyond the violation of
attorney-client privilege and the invasion of my privacy and that
of my correspondents, I no longer have access to my E-mail
addresses, since AOL kept them on its computer. And so I cannot
inform my contacts that I have a new E-mail provider. I have no
idea whether the Justice Department is still reading the E-mail
messages sent and received by my correspondents, whose addressees
turned up in the seizure of my accounts. Indeed, I continue to
have problems sending and receiving messages to my friends and
clients around the world with my new provider (which causes me to
wonder if the process is not still continuing). And I must explain
to clients and potential clients rightly concerned about
confidentiality that the U.S. government has read and may still
read E-mails to and from them.

In John Ashcroft's America,
Springmann's tale is shocking, but not surprising. (Thanks to
civil-liberties lawyer and Phoenix contributor Harvey
Silverglate for passing that along.)

THE SOUND OF MONEY. It seems
that the San Francisco Chronicle just can't stay out of
conflict-of-interest controversies. The latest: David Ewing Duncan, a
freelance columnist who covers the biotech industry, and who also
runs a company involved in biotech.

As Stanford University's Grade the
News reports,
the Chronicle okayed the arrangement, requiring only that
Duncan disclose his conflict. Yet, last year, the Chronicle
fired columnist Henry Norr for participating in an anti-war protest.
Norr covered technology; his extracurricular activities may have been
inappropriate for a journalist, but they hardly represented a
conflict.

More recently, the Chronicle
reassigned reporter Rachel Gordon and photographer Liz Mangelsdorf,
who had been covering the gay-marriage story, after they themselves
got married at City Hall. As I wrote
at the time, I think the Chronicle made the right call, since
they didn't just get married, but were actually taking part in the
very civil disobedience that they were covering.

But the Chronicle, having
set a very high standard with Norr, Gordon, and Mangelsdorf, should
do no less when it comes to financial conflicts. I guess money talks.
(Thanks to BK for this.)

The quote of the day is from
Attorney General Tom Reilly, commenting on the confusion and panic on
the part of city and town clerks that Romney claims will break out if
the May 17 marriage deadline isn't put off. Said Reilly: "This isn't
all that hard. A half-day's training would do it."

Thursday, April 15, 2004

LESS AIR FOR AIR AMERICA. I
caught about 40 minutes of Air America Radio's Morning
Sedition today, and no mention of the financial wrangling that
has knocked the liberal network off the air in Chicago and Los
Angeles. The Chicago Tribunereports
on the battle, which Drudge broke
yesterday.

Drudge also links to Air America's
statement,
which, as a lawyer might put it, is just loaded with actionable
phrases (highly entertaining!), and a copy of Air America's lawsuit,
which is available
on the Smoking Gun.

The dispute is between Air America
and Arthur Liu, who is the head of a small radio chain called
Multicultural Broadcasting. Curiously, when I wrote
about Air America's pre-broadcast plans in December (it was then
known as Central Air), Internet radio guru Scott
Fybush identified Liu's
stations in Watertown and Lynn as possible Boston-area
outlets.

Liu, though, told me that it wasn't
going to happen, because Air America wanted to buy his stations
outright and he didn't want to sell, although he would be willing to
lease airtime. "We're not in that game," Liu said with regard to a
sale.

Even more curiously, it appears
that Air America did finally decide to lease time on Liu's
stations in Chicago and Los Angeles - and is now paying a high price
for that.

NEW IN THIS WEEK'S
PHOENIX. A spate of recent books and articles shows that
the debacle
in Iraq didn't have to
happen.

Also, a new study on the economic
impact of the Democratic National Convention has provoked a
dispute
between Boston Herald columnist Cosmo Macero Jr. and the
Beacon Hill Institute.

KERRY'S NEMESIS. My former
Phoenix colleague Jon Keller, of WLVI-TV (Channel 56), has
been nominated for a New England Emmy for his half-hour special of
last November, "John
Kerry: One Reporter's Journal."
Keller also got an Emmy nomination in the reporting
category.

Somehow I don't think the senator
will be attending the awards banquet.

A few months ago Keller and I
debated the merits of Kerry's presidential candidacy on the New
Republic's website. You can read it here
if you're a subscriber.

Wednesday, April 14, 2004

KERRY AND THE GLOBE.Talk about timing. Yesterday, Slate's Tim Noah posted a
follow-up
to a piece he'd written earlier
contending that the Boston Globe despises John Kerry. Noah
argues that Globe editor Marty Baron's preface to a new
book, John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography by the Boston Globe
Reporters Who Know Him Best, "demonstrates Kerry's unique ability
to get under the Globe's skin."

This morning, the Globe
published a front-page, below-the-fold story by Michael Kranish - the
lead author of the Kerry bio - questioning whether Kerry deserved the
first of the three Purple Hearts he won while serving in the Vietnam
War. The story, headlined "Kerry Faces Questions over Purple Heart,"
examines the claims of a few right-wing Vietnam veterans who've
never gotten over Kerry's becoming a leading anti-war activist after
he returned home.

Kranish writes:

"He had a little scratch
on his forearm, and he was holding a piece of shrapnel," recalled
Kerry's commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Grant Hibbard.
"People in the office were saying, 'I don't think we got any
fire,' and there is a guy holding a little piece of shrapnel in
his palm." Hibbard said he couldn't be certain whether Kerry
actually came under fire on Dec. 2, 1968, the date in question and
that is why he said he asked Kerry questions about the
matter.

But Kerry persisted and, to his
own "chagrin," Hibbard said, he dropped the matter. "I do remember
some questions, some correspondence about it," Hibbard said. "I
finally said, 'OK, if that's what happened ... do whatever you
want.' After that, I don't know what happened. Obviously, he got
it, I don't know how."

Kerry declined to talk to the
Globe about the issue during the preparation of the Kerry
biography. But his press secretary, Michael Meehan, noted that the
Navy concluded that Kerry deserved the Purple Heart.

Kranish's piece, overall, is fair:
he points out at great length that regardless of whether Kerry
deserved his first Purple Heart, it is nevertheless true that his
reputation for heroism under fire is well-deserved. But the
pullquote, from Hibbard - "I've had thorns from a rose that were
worse" - is absolutely brutal.

The Globe has developed
something of a reputation for Kerry-bashing during this presidential
campaign. In addition to Tim Noah's two-parter, ABC
News's political dope sheet, The
Note, last November got at how just-fired
Kerry-campaign chief Jim Jordan felt about the Globe by
writing a
fictional letter from
Jordan to his replacement, Mary Beth Cahill. "Jordan" whacked the
Globe for "what is the most relentlessly negative coverage of
any presidential candidate EVER by a hometown paper - and I mean the
news page. Don't even get me started on the op-ed page." (Media Log
realizes that this is so post-modern as to be
meaningless.)

During a recent interview, I asked
Baron about the perception that the Globe is anti-Kerry. Among
other things, Baron called Noah's first piece "silly." It didn't make
it into the piece
I was working on (hey, I only had 8000 words!), but here is part of
the exchange we had:

Q: How do you
plead?

A: I plead
objective. We're covering him like we cover anybody else.
Obviously there were some stories that he probably would have
preferred not to see. We spent a lot of time researching John
Kerry, more than anybody else had, as far as I can tell. The
seven-part
series that we did last
June was as thorough a piece on a politician that's probably run
anywhere in a newspaper. Maybe that's a bit of hyperbole, but I
think it was pretty damn thorough. And in the process we learned a
lot about John Kerry that had not been previously known. Look,
he's running for president, we should know that.

There were
things that we wrote about Howard Dean that the Howard Dean
campaign was not terribly happy to see, and that actually affected
his campaign in a major way. The stuff about attracting offshore
companies, special tax breaks for insurance companies, things of
that sort. The tax plan. They weren't terribly happy to see those
stories, either. John Kerry used those stories to his
advantage.

Q: When does the
Kerry book come out?

A: Next month.
It's written. It's finished.

Q: How far does
this move beyond the seven-part series? Is there a lot of new
material?

A: Yeah, I
actually think there is new material. It's substantially longer
than the seven-part series, obviously, in order to make a book.
But in the process the reporters had a lot of additional material
in their notebooks. They also did additional reporting for the
book, and posed additional questions to the Kerry campaign. Some
of those questions were answered. Not all of those questions were
answered.

Q: What do you
hope the book will accomplish?

A: That people will have a
complete understanding of John Kerry, as best as it can be
developed at this point. Obviously I think it's important, and I
thought it was important when we went into this campaign, that the
Boston Globe be the source, the definitive source for
information about John Kerry. That I didn't think we should leave
any crumbs on the table for anybody else to pick up. That we
should do a thorough job, that we should be the point of reference
for anyone who really wants to know about John Kerry. And that
should be our job as the major newspaper in this
market.

So does the Globe have it in
for Kerry? A few columnists do. But as I told Noah back in January, and
as he acknowledged, there really isn't anyone at the Globe who
despises Kerry as much as do Boston Herald columnist Howie
Carr and WLVI-TV (Channel 56) political analyst Jon Keller. More than
anything, though, I think the Globe's coverage of Kerry shows
that it's not the same paper that gave aid and succor to the Kennedys
and other liberal Democrats for many years. That began to change
under Baron's predecessor, Matt Storin, and has accelerated since the
arrival of Baron, in 2001.

Is the story of Kerry's first
Purple Heart legitimate? Yes, but just barely. If Kerry's war heroism
were being questioned, that would be one thing, but Kranish's story
doesn't do that. More than anything, Kranish is advancing the agenda
of the sort of extremists who still hold signs reading "Vietnam Vets
Are Not Fonda Jane." While Kerry may have been seeking a
less-than-meaningful Purple Heart, George W. Bush was presumably
memorizing the names of his frat brothers at Yale.

But Baron's philosophy is that the
Globe is going to report everything about Kerry, and not
"leave any crumbs on the table." That's not negative reporting. It is
aggressive reporting, more aggressive than Kerry has perhaps been
used to over the years. And, in this particular case, bordering on
being more aggressive than is warranted by what happened all those
years ago.

WHAT WAS THE QUESTION?
George W. Bush last night gave his first televised news conference
since before the war in Iraq. I caught it in chunks. I have no
immediate reaction, but here was the toughest question
(full
transcript), followed by
Bush's answer/non-answer:

Q: Mr. President, before
the war you and members of your administration made several claims
about Iraq. That US troops would be greeted as liberators with
sweets and flowers. That Iraqi oil revenue would pay for most of
the reconstruction. And that Iraq not only had weapons of mass
destruction, but as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said, we know
where they are. How do you explain to Americans how you got that
so wrong? And how do you answer your opponents who say that you
took this nation to war on the basis of what have turned out to be
a series of false premises?

A: Well, let me step back and
review my thinking prior to going into Iraq. First, the lesson of
September 11 is when this nation sees a threat, a gathering
threat, we've got to deal with it. We can no longer hope that
oceans protect us from harm. Every threat we must take
seriously.

Saddam Hussein was a threat. He
was a threat because he had used weapons of mass destruction on
his own people. He was a threat because he coddled terrorists. He
was a threat because he funded suiciders [sic]. He
was a threat to the region. He was a threat to the United States.
That's the assessment that I made from the intelligence, the
assessment that Congress made from the intelligence. That's the
exact same assessment that the United Nations Security Council
made with the intelligence.

I went to the UN as you might
recall and said, Either you take care of him or we will. Anytime
an American president says, If you don't, we will, we better be
prepared to. And I was prepared to. I thought it was important for
the United Nations Security Council that when it says something,
it means something for the sake of security in the world. See, the
war on terror had changed the calculations. We needed to work with
people. People needed to come together - and therefore, empty
words would embolden the actions of those who are willing to kill
indiscriminately. The United Nations passed a Security Council
resolution unanimously that said, Disarm or face serious
consequences. And he refused to disarm.

I thought it was very
interesting that Charlie Duelfer, who just came back - he's the
head of the Iraqi Survey Group - reported some interesting
findings from his recent tour there. And one of the things was he
was amazed at how deceptive the Iraqis had been toward UNMOVIC and
UNSCOM [the UN agencies that searched Iraq for weapons of mass
destruction], deceptive at hiding things. We knew they were
hiding things. A country that hides something is a country that is
afraid of getting caught. And that was part of our calculation.
Charlie confirmed that. He also confirmed that Saddam had a - the
ability to produce biological and chemical weapons. In other
words, he was a danger. He had long-range missiles that were
undeclared to the United Nations. He was a danger. And so we dealt
with him.

What else, part of the question?
Oh, oil revenues. Well, the oil revenues are, they're bigger than
we thought they would be at this point in time. I mean one year
after the liberation of Iraq, the revenues of the oil stream is
pretty darn significant. One of the things I was concerned about
prior to going into Iraq was that the oil fields would be
destroyed. But they weren't. They're now up and running. And that
money is, it will benefit the Iraqi people. It's their oil. And
they'll use it to reconstruct the country.

Finally, the attitude of the
Iraqis toward the American people: it's an interesting question.
They're really pleased we got rid of Saddam Hussein. And you can
understand why. This is a guy who's a torturer, a killer, a
maimer. There's mass graves. I mean he was a horrible individual
that really shocked the country in many ways, shocked it into kind
of a fear of making decisions toward liberty. That's what we've
seen recently. Some citizens are fearful of stepping up. And they
were happy - they're not happy they're occupied. I wouldn't be
happy if I were occupied either.

They do want us there to help
with security. And that's why this transfer of sovereignty is an
important signal to send. And it's why it's also important for
them to hear we will stand with them until they become a free
country.

Okay, now. Where are the weapons?
What did Rumsfeld mean? Why did we have to lay out $87 billion when
the oil revenues were supposed to pay for the occupation? Why are the
Iraqis killing Americans?

Never mind. Next
question.

FREE-SPEECH FORUM. On
Thursday from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the Cambridge Public Library, I'll
be taking part in a panel
put together by PEN New England's Freedom to Write
Committee.

Billed as a forum on the Patriot
Act, I'll be joined by library director Susan Flannery, Boston
Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, and ACLU of Massachusetts executive
director Carol Rose. The discussion will be moderated by Judith Nies
and introduced by Fred Marchant.

Tuesday, April 13, 2004

SCALIA'S EMPTY APOLOGY.
Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia is very,
very sorry, and those to
whom he has apologized seem very, very pleased. But what everyone is
very, very missing is that he didn't apologize for anything he
did. Rather, he apologized for the actions of a deputy marshal,
Melanie Rube, who confiscated a tape from one reporter and a digital
recorder from another during a speech by Scalia at a Mississippi high
school last week.

Scalia's letter to the Reporters
Committee for Freedom of the Press is online here
(PDF file). Check out these excerpts:

You are correct that
the action was not taken at my direction; I was as upset as
you were. I have written to the reporters involved, extending my
apology and undertaking to revise my policy so as to permit
recording for use of the print media.

...

With regard to your further
suggestion that I direct security personnel not to confiscate
recordings - presumably even those made in violation of clearly
announced rules: Security personnel, both those of the
institutions at which I speak, and the United States Marshals,
do not operate at my direction, but I shall certainly
express that as my preference.

Can you figure out what Scalia is
apologizing for? I can't. And how would you like to be Melanie Rube
today? She may have been out of line, but don't you think she was
scared to death about what would happen to her when she realized two
reporters were violating Scalia's no-record policy? Why doesn't
Scalia apologize to her for putting her in an impossible
situation?

Talk about a meaningless
apology.

DON'T THINK TWICE, IT'S TOO
WEIRD. I had assumed that Bob Dylan's appearance in a Victoria's
Secret ad defied commentary. But Seth Stevenson is giving
it his best shot in
Slate. Here's the ad,
in which a tres sexy model cavorts to Dylan's song "Love Sick"
while Zimmy himself pops up a few times, like an elderly lecher
trying to peer into the model's window.

Rather than attempt to explicate
this myself, I will merely note that "Love Sick" - which kicks off
Dylan's multiple-Grammy 1997 album, Time out of Mind - is
amassing a strange history. While Dylan was performing "Love Sick" at
the 1998 Grammys, a guy jumped onto the stage with the words
"Soy
Bomb" painted on his bare
chest and slithered around for about half a minute before being
hauled away.

Monday, April 12, 2004

SOMBER ANNIVERSARY.Boston Herald reporter Jules Crittenden, an embed with the
Army's Third Infantry Division last year, has a terrific
"Radio
Diary" at the website for
the WBUR Radio program On Point.

Crittenden recalls riding through
the desert with the Atlantic Monthly's Michael Kelly and NBC
News's David Bloom. Within days, both would die, Kelly when a jeep in
which he was riding came under attack, Bloom of an embolism that was
probably caused by his cramped traveling conditions.

"It was not possible that Bloom and
Kelly could be dead and I would survive," Crittenden says. "I was
already dead. It just hadn't happened yet."

Crittenden also recalls his unit's
rolling into Baghdad and coming under fire - a moment when he called
out the positions of Iraqi gunners and thus helped US soldiers to
kill them. He
wrote about it
unapologetically, even defiantly, in the Herald last April.
Now he says of those doomed Iraqis:

I watched you die. Forgive
me. We all made our choices when we showed up for work that day.
It was your day to die. Not mine. But I remember you. I observe
the anniversary of your deaths and those of David Bloom and Michael
Kelly with the knowledge that this year of life has been a
gift.

THE RETURN OF CLARIBEL
VENTURA. In the early days of the welfare-reform movement, there
was no more horrifying a symbol of dysfunctional dependency than
Claribel Ventura. It was a young Boston Globe reporter named
Charles Sennott - now a foreign correspondent - who helped make her
so.

Ventura, then a 26-year-old welfare
mother of six, was accused of scalding her four-year-old son's hands
with boiling water as punishment for eating her boyfriend's food. In
1994 Sennott checked in on her extended family, and found that it had
about 100 members, virtually none of them working, pulling in about
$1 million a year in government benefits.

It may be no exaggeration to say
that welfare reform might never have happened in Massachusetts
without Sennott's story. Indeed, the fact that the liberal
Globe would publish such a story was seen in some circles as a
sign that the political structure now had permission to try something
new.

Now Sennott, on a visit to Boston,
has tracked down Ventura in an effort to learn what he had wrought.
He writes
that Ventura's life today is a mixed success: after seven years in
prison, she appears to have kicked drugs, and has begun a new family.
Yet - not surprisingly - she remains consumed with bitterness and
resentment, especially toward him.

Sennott also notes that legislators
are threatening to cut funding for the drug treatment program that
helped Ventura put her life more or less in order.

The welfare-reform story is a
muddled one. Certainly ending the culture of dependency was
necessary. Yet the law's Draconian aspects - especially its emphasis
on low-paid work over education, which traps families in a cycle of
poverty - bespeak to shortsightedness on the part of then-governor
Bill Weld, who appeared to be more interested in scoring cheap
political points than anything else.

Claribel Ventura was a powerful
symbol. I even found an academic
article called "Bad Mothers
and Welfare Reform in Massachusetts: The Case of Claribel Ventura" in
a 1997 book, Feminism, Media & the Law.

Sennott reminds us that the symbol
he helped create is also a real person.

MORE SCALIA. Good Bob
Herbert column
in today's New York Times on Scaliagate. Even if Herbert does
seem to think that reporters have a constitutional right to record
Scalia's speeches. (They don't.)

About Media Log Archives

The Boston Phoenix's Media Log was launched in 2002 by the paper's then-media columnist, Dan Kennedy, who continued it until he left the paper in 2005. The Phoenix's current media columnist, Adam Reilly, is now the author of Media Log, which has since been renamed Don't Quote Me. Kennedy, an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University, blogs at Media Nation.